Learning from Cathy Johnson

After taking Cathy Johnson's Sketchbook Skool Seeing klass, I picked up a couple of Cathy Johnson's books from the library: Creating Nature in Watercolor an Artist's Guide and Watercolor Pencil Magic. I loved both of these books so much, I purchased Cathy Johnson's Artist's Sketchbook - Exercises and Techniques for Sketching on the Spot from Amazon.

I can't recommend these books more. Cathy is so inspirational and shows that there are an infinite subjects to sketch! Here are some of my recent sketches inspired by Cathy's teachings.

Trailing lantana from my yard and fountain grass from a Broadway Plaza

A recently purchased air plant in watercolor and ink

Final Pages of my Travel Sketchbook

This summer, my 9 year old is attending "Camp Mom" - which means I am entertaining her most days while Chloe completes a year's worth of math with her teacher's tutoring. After math today, we worked on using Marc Taro Holmes's continuous single line sketching for some of our urban travel sketches.

We used a timer and drew all 4 of these sketches within 20 minutes. We added brush pen and watercolors afterwards.

Chloe did great with her own sketches but soon got tired. I finished my travel sketchbook with this last view out of the airplane before landing at SFO.

I'm a little sad to be done with this travel sketchbook. But on to the next!

Additions to My Travel Sketchbook

I've been adding drawings to my travel sketchbook based on photos I took during the trip. Here are my latest from Barcelona.

Illustrated Travel Journaling

In an attempt to document and remember our European trip, I put together these illustrated journal pages in my travel sketchbook. In this first page, I added in illustrations of our special pastries from the Balthazar x Bobbi Brown afternoon tea in London.

Afternoon tea at Balthazar in collaboration with Bobbi Brown.

These next three pages document the excellent Sidewalk Food Tour we took in Paris in the Latin Quarter.

And this page documents Day 1 of our trip.